Visual Studio TACO Update adds support for the newest versions of Cordova

Along with Visual Studio 2015’s Update 3 RC releasing today, Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (TACO) is receiving its Update 10. The tool for building apps for Android, iOS, and Windows all with JavaScript gained two major features:

Add plugins that require parameters through the config.xml designer, or select from 8 new plugins in our Core plugins list to access device capabilities and Azure services.

Adding support for the newest versions of Cordova, as well as moving users away from older Cordova versions (4.x and lower).

Since developers previously couldn’t add in plugins that required parameters, now TACO is able to utilize plugins through the config.xml designer. One such plugin is the Azure Mobile Engagement that takes parameters to retrieve data from the AZME portal.

TACO also switched from earlier versions of Cordova, setting the default version to Cordova to 6.1.1 for new projects. Cordova 6.2.0 is still supported, however.

As a side note, two new Visual Studio extensions have been put together for developers that prefer using the Iconic Framework as a starting point.

The Ionic Pack – tools ranging from IntelliSense to validation to make you more productive working with the Ionic Framework.

Ionic Project Templates – a set of 3 templates that cover all the basic app UI patterns (). It provides the code structure and adds the dependencies you need to have an Ionic project up and running fast.

Alongside the update for TACO and Visual Studio, developers are invited to try out the browser-based simulator tools. While developers already have Ripple, the Visual Studio team has been developing an alternative mobile device simulator called TACO Simulate. The team has put together a video to help interested parties walk through setting up and testing it out.

With their sights set forward towards the development of their Cordova browser simulator, TACO continues to become better through bug fixes and improved performance in each update.